Finding your Style

There is a lot of talk about an artist needing to find their style whether it is in painting, music, dance or whatever. People will sometimes search for years, and feel that they are still no closer to finding their own unique voice. Some even question whether there is such a thing as style at all. I think perhaps some may discount style because they do not know what it truly is; which when you think about it could make it awfully difficult to find. Out of the many things in this world; how are you supposed to find just one when you don’t even know what it looks like?

Some people talk about finding their style in the same grandiose terms of finding themselves. Like it is some sort of spirit quest that requires you to first find your animal guide, and to smudge yourself with sage before taking the journey inward. Or that you must lock yourself away from others, remain chaste and subjugate yourself from all earthly desire. In ancient Greece they would make offerings to the gods, particularly the muses, and pray that they would grant them the unique perspective to make great art. Cultures all over the world have practices and beliefs pertaining to how an artist can attain their voice. The fact that so many disparate cultures, from lands all over the earth and from all times, have such respect for artists and have gone to such lengths to help them find their way demonstrates how important an artist is to their people once they have found their voice. None of these different approaches I spoke about are wrong – they each work for some people, but only one way is right for you – so you may ask yet again: how do I find my style?

There is a trick to finding your style, and I have never seen it fail.

First though, it has to be understood what style is, and this is very simple. A person’s style is the natural way that they express themselves. Style can be recognized after the fact, but it is very difficult to ascertain what it is before it is known. It is like the birth of a child; you know the parents and so you have an idea of what the baby may look like, but as for the details you have to wait and see. Afterwards it seems obvious. This trying to know an artist’s style before it has been developed is a backwards way of approaching the subject.

The trick to finding your style is that you have to put it out of your mind; forget about your style. Work and work hard at what you do. Most of the great artists that have ever lived spent years emulating the people that they admired most. Duchamp would emulate a particular style until he had it perfected, and then would instantly move on to something else that challenged him. Hunter S. Thompson learned to write by retyping Fitzgerald novels word for word to learn the flow. Hemingway learned to write by diving into it and emulating the journalists and writers around him. When you think of a distinct style such as was possessed by Picasso, Mondrian, or Rothko you can look back over their work and find a definite pattern that led to their particular modes of expression. What is important to take from here is that when Picasso first picked up a brush he was not thinking about cubism. Even though he and Braque invented this style it was formed naturally over time.

I’m not just going to leave you with that though; telling a person not to think about something is a sure fire way to have them obsess over it. Trying to see your style is a lot like trying to look at your own face without using a mirror. It is right there but it is just out of sight. Style is not found; it develops in much the same way as the weather does, and like the weather it is a natural progression of chaotic events. A multitude of factors are involved to decide if a single cloud will form in a certain time and space or if an artist is going to choose one brush stroke, line, or color over another. The very next moment and perhaps the cloud would not have formed or the brush stroke may never have been made. It is true that what happens is controlled by initial conditions and no random elements are really involved, but according to proponents of chaos theory, this is the true nature of what chaos actually is. What occurs is explainable and natural, but also inherently difficult to predict. Even if you did predict correctly it would only last for that moment because artistic expression, just like the weather, is constantly on the move.

It seems that when a person really wants to find their style it is because they have an honest longing to become a serious artist; finding your style becomes the Holy Grail of artistic achievement. Identifying your style, however, does not necessarily make you a better artist. It is interesting to me how when an artist becomes aware of their style, and has been viewed as being successful with it; very often this marks the beginning of their decline in creativity. They become known for painting a certain way; become famous for it, and can sell art as long as it matches this external perception of their artwork. Hemingway knew this and wrote about how he acted foolishly when he first started receiving recognition for his writing – showing people what he was working on and the like until he realized what he was doing and settled back down to serious work. I read once where he was concerned that winning the Nobel Prize would ruin him as a writer because of the attention that it generated over the way that he wrote.

The production of true art is an expression that comes from a place deep inside of us that goes beyond intellectualization because it is also from an area of emotion and physicality. This is a place that has been called ‘no mind,’ and if you have ever painted, wrote, or played music to the point that time disappears and your creativity flows and just seemingly occurs out of nowhere then you already know what I’m talking about. This is a state that crosses all disciplines; Bruce Lee made this concept the heart of his fighting system, Beethoven demonstrates the feeling of this moment in his 9^th, and Coltrane achieves this state in the silence between his notes in ‘Giant Steps’.

Of course once the artistic act has been completed everyone can discuss and intellectualize all they want, but in the moment of creation it is the artist’s ability to push beyond all of this that is key. When I said that there was a trick to finding your style, and that it is to forget about the search for it – I hope that I have made what I meant clear, and that I wasn’t being flippant or dismissive about this important subject. Those that have had the most unique voices in art often seem to be the ones that work hard, and do not concern themselves overly with searching for a style; they give it no thought and express themselves naturally – which of course is the very epitome of style.